As the Boston Marathon bombing continues to dominate the news, several characteristic responses to terrorism are becoming obvious once again. To begin with, reports of terrorist acts in America have become like the throwing of a mental switch that stops people from thinking. Emotion is high and critical thought is rare in the midst of the initial media frenzy. Propaganda has made it easy for people to fear and hate while forgetting facts about the government’s role in terrorism and its tendency to benefit from terrorist acts. Additionally, the Boston incident has shown again how official accounts of terrorist events tend to change dramatically as time passes.

Immediately after the attacks, the entire city of Boston, an icon of independence and freedom since the American Revolution, was locked down in a frantic search for one scared teenage boy. The suddenly “infantilized” public responded by accepting an unprecedented police-state occupation of the city.[1] The mainstream media did not question any of these obviously anti-American actions and reported only the sensationalist viewpoint of the government “protectors.”[2]

The Boston story began to change quickly, however. For example, just days after the bombing, the mother of the two suspects made some startling remarks about her son’s relationship to the FBI.

“He (Tamerlan) was ‘controlled’ by the FBI, like, for three to five years,” she said, “They knew what my son was doing. How could this happen?…They were controlling every step of him, and they are telling today that this is a terrorist attack,” she added.[3]

Although surprising, these claims agree with facts known about FBI-sponsored terrorist acts that have played out in the last decade. In 2011, journalist Glenn Greenwald reported that the cases in which the FBI had supposedly stopped terrorist plots were actually instances of the FBI itself plotting the terrorist acts and entrapping the young suspects.

“None of these cases entail the FBI’s learning of an actual plot and then infiltrating it to stop it. They all involve the FBI’s purposely seeking out Muslims (typically young and impressionable ones) whom they think harbor animosity toward the U.S. and who therefore can be induced to launch an attack despite having never taken even a single step toward doing so before the FBI targeted them. Each time the FBI announces it has disrupted its own plot, press coverage is predictably hysterical (new Homegrown Terrorist caught!), fear levels predictably rise, and new security measures are often implemented in response.”[4]

The 1993 WTC bombing was also a case of suspicious FBI activities gone wrong. As the New York Times reported, it was clear that the FBI was somehow involved in the WTC plot.

“Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast. The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said.”[5]

In the years leading up to 9/11, the FBI failed miserably at preventing terrorism when preventing terrorism was the FBI’s primary goal. Moreover, the actions of FBI management suggest that it was facilitating and covering-up acts of terrorism. When 9/11 happened, some agents accused their own agency of being responsible.[6]

Therefore it is not surprising that the mother of the Boston bombers, who declared that the Bureau had been controlling her son, was labeled as a terrorist suspect just a week after her accusations against the FBI.[7] Supposedly, the CIA had put her name in its terrorism database months before her sons’ actions in Boston. This was followed up more recently by vague claims from “U.S. officials” that the mother was recorded by Russian authorities speaking to her son about “the idea of jihad.”[8] Although these late claims appear to be a matter of the government declaring an unwanted witness to be untrustworthy, the growing myth of the Boston bombing raises a number of interesting questions.

What could the mother have possibly gained from offering up her two sons as fodder for the terrorism-industrial complex?

Why didn’t the FBI and CIA immediately report that the mother was a terrorism suspect, instead of waiting two weeks and saying something only after the mother had publicly made accusations against the FBI?

Why haven’t the mother’s claims with regard to the FBI controlling her sons been investigated by independent reporters in the U.S. mainstream media?

How does this case relate to reports that the “underwear bomber” was working for the CIA?[9]

Will the media follow-up on the recent revelations that the Boston suspects were related to a top CIA official?[10]

The U.S. government has fostered and benefited from a fear of terrorism since 9/11. Realizing this, citizens would do well to remember how quickly their freedoms can be lost in the uproar over even a single, relatively low impact terrorist incident. The Boston Marathon bombing has reminded us that freedom comes at the price of eternal vigilance. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have the ability to control one’s emotional responses and temper the reactions of others. When the next attack occurs, and as the official account of this incident evolves, people should watch for similarities with the accounts of other terrorist events and question everything they are being told.